The introduction of 28nm high-volume production for IC semiconductor devices will usher the era of “extreme low-k1” manufacturing, i.e. the unprecedented situation in the long history of the silicon technology roadmap, where computationally intensive (and EDA-driven) Design-Technology Co-Optimization will become the… Read More




The Midwestern Hedge Fund Manager
Four years ago, a VC friend of mine was invited to a get together with a prominent Hedge Fund Manager from the Midwest. The meeting was an arrangement between fellow Harvard Grads. The Fund Manager was looking to make investments in the valley, to diversify away from his heavily weighted financial positions. Though, not recognized… Read More
Intel Tri-Gate is in Trouble?!?!?!
Since the last Intel logo parody went over so well here is another one! Not so much a parody in light of the recent PR from Intel that the fabless semiconductor business model is doomed. As one of the doomed little people inside the fabless ecosystem I take exception to this but I digress….
The word around Silicon Valley is that Intel … Read More
DAC 2012…need caffeine?
You are in San Francisco for DAC and you want a coffee. OK, if your booth duty is 5 minutes away you pretty much have to take the Moscone coffee. Tastes good, hot, has caffeine. As Meatloaf used to sing (showing my age here) two out of three ain’t bad.
Yes, there are Starbucks all over the city, one on 4th Street just by Moscone Center,… Read More
AMS Programmable Prototype Platforms
AVNET released their 15[SUP]th[/SUP] Xfest this year, a couple of months ago. It was here in Germany last week. It was a well organized event, rich with invaluable technical information and full of decent smart engineers and managers. If you missed it this year register for the next event as soon as you can.
It was a very successful… Read More
EDAC Emerging Companies: Learn How to Emerge
EDAC has a series of seminars for emerging companies with Jim Hogan. Jim has been in EDA since, like, forever. First at National, then at Cadence, then at Artisan (now ARM) and then as an investor first at Telos (Cadence’s VC arm) and more recently on his own at Vista Ventures. He has been involved with many EDA and semiconductor… Read More
Layout Migration and DRC Correction at DAC 2012
In the world of sub-40nm IC design, as feature size decreases with each new process node, it becomes increasingly difficult to migrate a layout to a new process technology. Too many factors impact manufacturability and yield. At each new process node, to make sure that a given layout is manufacturable and yields well, it is subject… Read More
Going with the Flow at AMD
At EDPS in Monterey, Tom Spyrou of AMD talked about their compute environment in the context of parallel algorithms. I discovered that they are a big user of RTDA’s FlowTracer so I talked to Philip Steinke at AMD about how they used it.
He said that they largely use it as described in The Art of Flows as a graphical distributed … Read More
Novocell Semiconductor Update 2012!
Since most of you have not heard of Novocellthis is more of an introduction but they have been around for 10+ years and are NVM (non-volitile memory) pioneers. NVM has evolved into a critical part of the semiconductor ecosystem which is why I sought them out. While SiDense and Kilopass bury each other in legal fees Novocell is doing… Read More
Aldec and Tanner EDA at DAC
In April I blogged about a webinar on co-simulation hosted by Aldec and Tanner EDA where they showed how the RTL simulator (Riviera PRO) and SPICE simulator (T-Spice) had been connected together for IC designers wanting to do real AMS simulations.
The availability date of the co-simulation wasn’t clear, so today the press… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot